Over the past several decades, the telecommunications industry has continued to expand and experience growth spurts in technology. One of the most prevalent services provided in recent telecommunications technology is voicemail. Voicemail has continued to expand and establish itself as a key element in the successful operations of most businesses. The typical voicemail system today can take on a variety of forms, including a computer card that can operate within a personal computer connected to a businesses telephone system, or a computer card or component that is directly integrated into the businesses telephone system, or as a service provided by a telecommunications company.
Most voicemail systems today typically are heavily reliant on software programming. The systems include many thousands of lines of code that typically execute on a single platform or computing device. The voicemail products are usually developed as the result of a great amount of effort by a highly skilled team of software programmers and hardware developers and typically, a single roll-out of a voice mail product requires many man-hours of development, testing, debugging and perfecting. The amount of work required in such a development effort does not lend itself to developing a customized product line but rather, is the most profitable when customers agree to purchase the fully developed product.
But in today's diverse society with ever expanding needs and nuances, it is difficult to develop a single product line that meets the needs of all prospective customers. Thus, developers are forced to develop products directed towards large business sectors, or attempt to deeply penetrate niche markets. Sometimes developers will launch multiple versions of a product in an attempt to capture a larger market share. This raises additional problems for the developers—mainly in the area of support. The more product variants that are sold, the more complex the companies support infrastructure must be to meet the needs of its customers.
One technique that can be employed by developers is to provide a product that can be customized by the user. Such a product can use configuration files and input parameters to allow for some level of customization in the operation of the system. Such a technique can somewhat address this need in the art; however, the technique falls significantly short of an ideal solution because it heavily relies on the developer to be able to comprehend and program into the system the ability to customize the operation in a manner that the end user will want. This is a daunting task.
Thus, there exists a need in the art for a telecommunications service platform that allows for complete customization by the end user or for the end user and that does not significantly increase the cost to develop, manufacture and market to the end user. The present invention provides such a solution.